Richland 2’s Baron Davis floats possibilities for returning to class amid coronavirus

Richland 2 Superintendent Baron Davis has hinted at some possible major changes at the district when students return for the fall.

Perhaps the boldest of those potential changes would be taking high school education completely online and using the district’s 40 school buildings to hold K-8 education completely in a traditional setting with social distancing, Davis said Wednesday during a Facebook Live Q&A with The State.

Because social distancing requires more empty space between people, schools have been wrestling with how to teach as many students in-person as possible using the buildings they have, some of which are already at or nearing capacity.

“One of the things that is going to be totally different will be we’re going to have social distancing guidance and procedures in place,” Davis said. ‘You won’t see your normal school building set up in its current design. I’m sure there will be things like shields, requirements of stations for sanitizing. Classrooms will be redesigned in the sense that you will probably have less desks in the classroom. The way we transfer from class to class, enter and exit buildings, all of those things are probably going to look different.”

The district is also considering a “hybrid” model in which students would spend some days in school and other days doing schoolwork remotely, Davis said.

“We’re exploring as many different models as we can in order to provide our students with a premier educational experience while keeping them as safe as we possibly can.”

The district in northeast Richland County is waiting on recommendations from the S.C. Department of Education’s task force, AccelerateEd, before deciding for sure what to do next school year.

“I’m anticipating the end of June, (or) the very first of July, we should start being able to share more specifics about what our plan will look like,” Davis said.

One of the biggest unknowns is how districts are going to transport students to school while social distancing on school buses, Davis said.

“It’s definitely going to impact the way we transport students to our schools,” Davis said of COVID-19.

To test how different it would be, Richland 2 ran a mock bus route for one of its larger elementary schools, Bethel-Hanberry Elementary. The mock bus route assumed there would be one student per seat, every other seat, to maintain social distancing.

For just Bethel-Hanberry, it took two hours to get students to school, Davis said.

“Two hours one-way,” Davis said. “So that’s four hours dedicated to just busing students back and forth to school.”

And that analysis includes only one elementary school.

“Most parents who can take their sons and daughters to school already do so,” Davis said. “For many of the students, the only way of getting to school is via the bus.”

Busing is one of the key issues school administrators are looking to get guidance on from AccelerateEd. The task force, which includes teachers, school board members, S.C. Superintendent of Education Molly Spearman and other educators, will meet Thursday, June 11, at 10 a.m. and will broadcast live its meeting from the S.C. Department of Education’s website.

“We going to have to bring a lot of patience with us as we transition,” Davis said.